


Traces

by atlas (cissysullivan)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 23:55:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cissysullivan/pseuds/atlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is blinded during a hunt and Sam does everything he can to fix it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the Wincest BigBang on LiveJournal, but I missed my posting date and I've never done this before, so I'm posting it on here for now and hoping that my artist can post it up on the LiveJournal for this later.

Out of all of the things in the world that Dean Winchester could spend a long time staring at, there were three that stood out from all the rest.

            The first thing was the stars.

            Sam often argued that they were just pinpricks of light in a dark blanket of sky that couldn’t even really be seen most of the time, but Dean thought of them as so much more than that. To him, they were what people became when they died. Of course, science told him that stars were nothing more than condensed balls of light and gas that polka-dotted space, but he’d been hunting monsters since he was four years old. Logic and science didn’t exactly apply to the world he lived in and in _his_ world, where Wendigos prowled the Northern woods, ghosts haunted abandoned buildings, and werewolves stalked the streets during the full moon, stars weren’t what science said they were.

            In Dean’s world, when you die, you become a star. You shine down on the earth. You watch over the ones you love. You take care of the world as best you can from your position in the sky and when your loved ones join you, you become a constellation. The biggest constellations were the biggest gestures of love and though Dean knew that many of the constellations meant the exact opposite, he didn’t care. Death was something that was ever-present in his world. Every time he went on a hunt, chose to step between Sam and whatever monster was threatening him, his life was in danger. And he was used to it and, though death had lost its significance, Dean still liked to think that when he died for good, he would become a star with Sam on his left, his mother and father on his right, and everyone he’d ever loved surrounding him, joining him in making a picture in the sky.

            The second was the open road.

            Perhaps it was because he’d grown up on the road or perhaps it was because he thought of the impala as his one true home, Dean had always found the road beautiful.

It was the roads that no one used that he enjoyed the most. The ones that passed by farms and rolling hills, abandoned graveyards and small towns, and broken wooden fences with no hope of repair and hundred-year-old churches with peeling paint. Of course, going through the city at times was unavoidable, but Dean did his best to keep away from it. He’d grown up on back roads and in small towns and that was where he tended to stay.

As a child, when it had been his father driving instead of him, Dean would sit up in the front when Sam was sleeping or Sam was angry at him and just watch the road roll under the impala and watch the world pass them by. There wasn’t much he could do in a car. Board games were hazardous and tended to get everywhere, action figures got lost under the seats, the Legos had fallen in the air vent and, to this day, he couldn’t get them out. So, when he wasn’t in the mood for playing with the army men that he would only have to spend hours trying to get out from under the seats later, Dean would stare out the window and watch the trees, the people, the grass, and the sky as the impala cruised through the world.

When he’d been much, much younger, he’d thought that maybe one day, he wouldn’t be able to see the road anymore. They’d kill the thing that killed Mom and settle down and that would be the end of driving through back roads in the impala. That would be the end of sleeping curled around Sam in the backseat as their father drove through the night, the end of picking out clouds during the summer and coming up with stories of who lived on them, the end of carrying around their belongs in boxes and backpacks.

The end of the impala being their home.

It was something Dean had always secretly dreaded. But as he’d gotten older and he’d realized that this wasn’t something that would ever happen. And he was right. Even after they’d killed the yellow-eyed demon, they still were hunting, and, even though this was only because he’d sold his soul to save Sam, something told him that even if he hadn’t had to do that, the hunting life would’ve found them again and they never really would’ve been able to stop and settle down and, though a part of Dean wanted desperately to leave the hunting life, find a girl, have 2.5 kids, another, larger part was glad that he’d never be tied to just one home, because, he knew, if he stopped hunting, he’d have to choose between the home that everyone referred to as his home or the home that had been his home ever since he was four years old.

The third thing, the thing that Dean enjoyed looking at more than anything else, was the same as the thing he couldn’t live without.

Sam.

The first time Dean had laid eyes on Sam was through the nursery window at the hospital only a few hours after he was born. He was in an incubator, his name spelled out in paper letters on the side. His dark hair was already long enough to curl in his eyes and when Dean was able to hold him for the first time the next day when Mary and John brought him home, he opened them, revealing a beautiful hazel that Dean would never forget.

It was this hazel that Dean would see every day for the rest of his life in one way or another. He would see happiness when Dean made his favorite soup. Calm when he held him after a nightmare. Sadness when his girlfriend was murdered. Anger when he agreed with their father instead of him. Jealousy when Dean came home smelling of cheap booze and sex.

It was this hazel that Dean would see the light go out of in an abandoned town, surrounded by nothing except ghosts and desperation.

But it wasn’t just Sam’s eyes that Dean appreciated.

It was every inch of his brother.

He loved Sam’s hair. He teased him about it. He told him he wanted to cut it. But, in all actuality, Dean liked it at the length it was. He enjoyed curling his fingers in it and pretending he’d done it by accident. He liked the way it brushed the back of his neck and how feathery it was on the ends. He loved Sam’s hands. He loved how they were so big and yet, at the same time, so delicate. They were gentle and kind, caring and protective. But they could also be strong and dangerous, damaging and defensive.  He loved Sam’s height. This was another thing he wouldn’t admit to his brother. Being the older of the two, he’d felt more than a little bitter when Sam had surpassed him in height, especially when he’d taken every chance to tease him about it. But as time had gone on and the teasing had faded and then stopped, he’d grown to love looking up in to his brother’s eyes instead of down.

But what Dean loved about Sam more than anything else, was his personality, the way he never saw the world in black and white, the way he always had hope, the way he was certain that there could be no more reason to hunt, if he just tried hard enough. Dean knew differently, but he was glad that Sam still had that last shred of innocence that had died within Dean long ago.

Though he knew his brother thought otherwise, to Dean, Sam was what perfection looked like. Of course, he had his faults. He’d done things that neither of them was proud of. He’d let Dean down more than once, but Dean knew he’d done the same to him. And now that all of that was over, now that Lucifer was back in the pit, his powers were no longer used, and Ruby was gone, Dean realized something he hadn’t before: Sam wouldn’t be perfect to him, if he didn’t have his flaws, which made Dean wonder.

Were they flaws if he loved them?

In a world where his senses ruled, Dean’s sight was by far his favorite. If he lost his hearing, he would be alright. He could learn sign language and firing guns wouldn’t be that much of a problem anymore, even if that did mean he’d have to rely on Sam for most things. If he lost his sense of smell, that wouldn’t be that great of a loss either. There weren’t that many smells he enjoyed other than the scent of Sam’s aftershave. If he lost his sense of taste, he’d be upset, but he would get over it. He could eat anything he wanted then and not have to worry about the gross consequences. The one thing Dean didn’t want to lose was his sight. If he could no longer see the stars at midnight, the road in the morning, or Sam’s bright smile, he wasn’t sure he could find a reason to keep on going through this dark world, this dark life any longer.


	2. One

One would think that after hunting for so long, Dean Winchester would’ve gotten used to the horrors of the job and nightmares wouldn’t be an issue, but that wasn’t at all the case. In fact, he got more nightmares than most, though, this probably had something to do with the fact he’d watched his brother die repeatedly and he’d been through Hell. Literally. Even for hunters, they had strange lives. However, when Dean awoke from his nightmares that night, they hadn’t been of Hell or of any of Sam’s deaths, they’d been of the death of someone else, who’d been close to him, someone who had just died recently: Bobby Singer.

He’d been like a father to the two boys. He’d seemed almost more invincible than their real father had at the time of _his_ death. It just seemed unreal that could be gone, too. But that was the fact of the matter. He’d been shot in the head by a Leviathan, Dick Roman, and now he was gone and he wasn’t coming back. Dean had learned his lesson with making deals to bring back the dead. So, instead, he was planning his revenge and, when he woke up that night after having yet another dream of being unable to save Bobby from his fate, instead of going back to sleep, he went to the computer, sitting on the table in the kitchenette of their motel and began searching for clues as to Dick Roman’s whereabouts. They knew that Borax weakened a Leviathan and they knew that chopping off their head slowed them down, but they had yet to figure out what killed one and that was what Dean was searching for. He wanted Roman dead.

“What’re you doing up so early?”

Sam’s sleepy voice startled Dean. He looked up from the computer and at his brother. As his visions of Lucifer had gotten steadily worse, he’d started having more and more trouble sleeping, which was why whenever Dean was awake and Sam was asleep, he would let him sleep. He didn’t want to wake him. He felt bad about having done it now.

“Just…” he tried to think of an excuse as to why he would be on Sam’s laptop at four in the morning and when none came to him, his brother sighed audibly.

“Please tell me you’re not still looking for leads on Dick,” he mumbled, sounding about as tired as he looked.

Dean said nothing.

“Do you really think this is what Bobby would’ve wanted for us?” he asked, sounding almost angry. “Searching for his killer obsessively? Forgetting that we have other, better things to be doing? Like getting rid of the Leviathan as a whole?”

This time it was Dean that sighed. “Yeah, well, we’ve got _no_ leads on that, so I’m trying to find one for the son of a bitch that’s leading these bastards.”

Sam sighed again and said nothing else. He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and closed the door. A few moments later, Dean heard the shower go on. He half wondered if he should sit closer to the door in case his brother slipped or fell asleep. He knew he was being more than a little overprotective right now, but after Sam’s wall had broken his brother had lost a step, so Dean’s anxiety wasn’t exactly unfounded.

And neither was Sam’s.

As the younger of the two Winchester’s stood under the hot shower spray, he thought about how Dean’s drinking had increased, how he slept about as much as Sam did anymore and sometimes not at all, how he spent all of his free time on his computer going on fruitless searches of Dick Roman’s current location.  Dean wasn’t seeing hallucinations of Lucifer, but he still had to be looked after, just in a different way than Sam did.

“How are you supposed to look after him when you can barely handle me?”

The devil’s puzzled voice made Sam jump and knock over the shampoo bottle provided by the motel. It rolled around in the tub noisily.

“You okay in there? Or do you need me to come in?”

This time the voice was Dean’s.

“I’m fine,” Sam called back, pretending he hadn’t heard his brother’s second question.

He scoffed lightly.

What a pair they made.

-

They’d moved on to the next town and their next case by the time Dean found something that could help him in his vendetta against the leader of the Leviathan. Apparently there was one living nearby that spoke with Roman often. Of course, there were only ten or twelve Leviathan total, so they _all_ had spoken with him more than once, but this one was said to be around him almost constantly, which meant either the Leviathan was taking a paid vacation or they had just stumbled upon the town Dick Roman was in and their luck was finally turning around. They _were_ supposed to be hunting a ghost of a seven year old girl that was haunting a church a few blocks away from their motel, but Dean told Sam they had to drop that case now that this new information had come to light.

            “We have a chance to get the bastard that killed Bobby! We have to take this chance! It could be the only one we get!” he told him after they’d gotten back from the church and another round of questions that had been directed at the pastor and his wife.

            “You know we can’t kill him, Dean!” Sam reminded him. “As far as we know, Leviathan can’t _be_ killed! What’s the point of getting him now when all we’ll be doing is dragging him around with us? He’ll have every chance in the world to get away!”

            “Does it matter?!” Dean asked, sounding incredulous. “We’ll _have_ him and we’re not idiots, Sam. We’ll _make sure_ he doesn’t get away! I’m _not_ letting him walk away from this!”

            Sam pursed his lips as Lucifer reminded him, “You know that once he puts his mind to something there really isn’t any way you can stop him.”

The devil paused.

“He’s probably going to get himself killed. You’re not very good at protecting him.”

Sam’s hands balled into fists.

“In fact, you’re not much good at anything, are ya, Sammy?”

Sam had clenched his teeth as well when he noticed that Dean was looking at him funny and he knew his brother knew that Lucifer was talking to him again. He’d since figured out that they were just hallucinations, they weren’t real, Lucifer wasn’t really there, but that didn’t make them happen any less often. In fact, this seemed to almost have encouraged the devil into appearing more than was necessary. Still, Sam had a trick now, one Dean had taught him when the hallucinations were first getting to be unbearable. He pressed his thumb into the scar on his hand and the devil stuck his tongue out at him before he flickered out of sight.

That problem having been taken care of, Sam let out a nervous sigh and said, “Fine. We’ll do this, but we’re capturing his man first and questioning him. I’m not going to go into Roman’s offices with no information whatsoever. We need to be prepared Dean.”

“Fine,” Dean agreed, but he was excited. Finally, _finally_ after too long, Bobby would be avenged. He just had to wait a little while longer and, with how things were going, he was pretty sure he could do that.

-

It took Sam a week to be convinced they were ready. They spent three days watching the Leviathan. He did things that every other human being did: he went to the grocery store, he got gas, he walked his neighbor’s dog. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was wearing the meatsuit of a man, who’d gone missing in Milwaukee around the time the Leviathan had first started appearing, he might almost have thought they had the wrong person. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. They were all too certain about what this man was and what he was doing.

            It was on the Friday of that week, when everyone else was going to the movies and buying popcorn that Sam and Dean Winchester decided it would be a good idea to capture the Leviathan, question him on Dick Roman’s whereabouts and activities, before cutting off his head and burying it at least a thousand miles away from where they would bury his body making it ten times harder for humpty-dumpty to put himself back together again – as Dean so graciously put it the afternoon they were sitting in their motel room, cleaning their guns and getting them ready for the night ahead.

To be completely honest, Sam was more worried about his brother getting cocky and getting himself killed than capturing the Leviathan they were supposed to be after. Having been around him his entire life, Sam knew that the odds of Dean keeping his head in the coming fight was slim. Dean had a problem keeping his head when their job involved revenge. All he wanted to do was kill. Of course, he knew he had to plan first if the job were to be successful, but once they got there, once they’d done everything they’d planned to do, he would go off on his own, do what _he_ thought was best and fuck anyone who disagreed with him. This had gotten better over the years, but it was still bad enough that Sam was worried.

“Maybe you should lock him in a closet,” Lucifer said from a chair near the door. He was blowing a pinwheel. Sam wasn’t sure how he’d acquired it. They hadn’t walked past any houses with pinwheels that day that Sam recalled. He struggled to ignore the devil, even as he reminded him, “he _has_ locked you up before when it was for your own good. Like when you couldn’t stop drinking that juicy red demon blood. Remember that, Sammy?”

“Sam?”

This time the voice was Dean’s. Sam looked up from what he was doing. He didn’t remember freezing in his actions of putting his sawed-off together, but Lucifer’s words had gotten to him. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t afraid to this day of succumbing to his previous addiction and he began feeding off of demons again. That was the one thing that had come between him and his brother and the last thing he wanted was for it to happen again.

Mentally shaking himself and subtly pressing his thumb against the scar on his hand, he gave Dean a tight-lipped smile and said, “I’m fine,” before returning to doing what he had been before the devil had distracted him.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Dean’s voice was soft and soothing, but sure and firm at the same time. “You’re seeing him again, aren’t you? Lucifer.”

Sam swallowed, his grip on the sawed-off tightening once more. “I’m fine,” he said again, neither confirming nor denying that he was, in fact, seeing the devil. He would be lying if he said it hadn’t gotten slightly worse since Bobby’s death, but he pretended he was alright, he pretended he was fine, because Dean needed him to be and burdening his brother with his hallucinations was just plain selfish, especially after all they’d been through lately. Dean had enough on his mind. He didn’t need to be thinking about his hallucinations, too.

“I just want to help you, Sam,” Dean said, cutting through his thoughts. Sam expected him to say more, tell him that he was being ridiculous in hiding this from him, but he didn’t. He just went back to sorting through their guns, putting what he thought they would need into a black duffle bag and leaving the rest, which was almost worse because it meant that Dean was too upset to talk about it.

-

They left the motel and took all of their belongings with them. The likelihood of them being able to come back after capturing the Leviathan was slim. Dick Roman was one of the most popular people in America at the moment and it wouldn’t go unnoticed that one of his favorite henchmen – as Dean referred to him – was suddenly missing. It also was unlikely that it would go unnoticed that the people who’d taken him were none other than the killers everyone had recently presumed dead.

            “We get in, grab him, get out, and get as far away from this town as possible,” Dean told Sam as they parked their current vehicle a block away from the nondescript house the Leviathan was residing in. “Dick’s going to have a warrant out for our arrest the minute he realizes what happened, which, considering how well he knows us, won’t take very long. I just want all the information we can squeeze out of this bastard before we gank him.”

            Sam didn’t argue. What _he_ wanted was for Dean to stop caring about Dick Roman so much. What _he_ wanted was for Dean to give this up and realize that killing Dick Roman shouldn’t be a vengeance mission because it wouldn’t bring Bobby back. What _he_ wanted was for Dean to put all of his energy into stopping the Leviathan because he would kill others if they didn’t. All Sam wanted was for Dean to be happy and he realized that their lives weren’t exactly built for that, but still that was what he wanted and he knew that trying to get the drop on Roman wasn’t going to _make_ him happy. It was only going to fulfill him for an instant, before he fell back into the sadness that had consumed him since Bobby’s death.

            “Let’s get this done,” Dean mumbled as he slammed the trunk of the car shut and started down the sidewalk towards the Leviathan’s house, their big, black duffle bag, full of their weapons, slung over his shoulder.

Sam watched his brother walk away, still thinking about Dick Roman and his brother’s unhappiness as Lucifer whispered, “He’s going to get himself killed, Sammy. You’re going to have to watch Dean die.”

“Shut up,” Sam hissed and hurried after Dean.

-

Sam wasn’t sure what Dean was expecting to happen when they got to the house, but he had to stop his brother from banging on the door and announcing their arrival thus giving their enemy time to escape. Instead, Sam pulled him to the side, forced him to empty the duffle bag of the weapons that they deemed necessities, before hiding it in a clump of bushes by the side of the house. They could come back for it once they were done with their job.

            After picking the lock to the house, the two brothers moved inside as quietly as they could manage, squirt guns full of every day dish soap held out in front of them.

“I feel ridiculous,” Dean whispered to Sam as he glanced around a corner.

“This is full of the only stuff we know of that harms Leviathan,” he reminded Dean. “Ridiculous or not it’s the only weapon we have that’ll really work on them.”

Dean didn’t say anything in response, but Sam knew he hadn’t exactly helped boost Dean’s pride, though, considering Dean’s recent actions and mental state – which wasn’t much better than Sam’s – maybe this was a good thing.

There was a creak upstairs that made both of their gazes snap up to the ceiling. Dean signaled towards the stairs and Sam nodded and soon they were both making their way silently up the staircase. Once they reached the top, Dean pressed his back against the wall to the right of the stairs and signaled for Sam to do the same. For a moment, they stood, listening to the sounds of the settling house. Then they heard another creak, sounding more like a footstep from their new vantage point, and made their way down the hall towards the bedrooms.

Without warning, a man, just a little shorter than Dean, burst out of one of the bedrooms and stood before the Winchesters. For a moment, he looked like an ordinary man, worried because two strangers had invaded his home and, for a moment, Dean wondered if they were wrong and this was just some guy that happened to work closely with Dick Roman. Then he remembered that no _human_ worked that closely with a Leviathan and the man standing before him had disappeared from his real home only a few days ago and he lunged at him again, just as the Leviathan smirked in a way that suggested he could read his thoughts and maybe he could. Who knew? There was next to no lore on Leviathan. They weren’t a creature any hunter had ever faced before. For all they knew, mind-reading was a skill they had that they hadn’t yet revealed. But, for the record, Dean certainly hoped not.

They struggled in the hallway. Dean pressing the Leviathan up against the wall, his watergun pressed against his throat as he struggled to gain the upper hand long enough to pull his weapon out of the Leviathan’s grip and spray him with some of the soap suds that were deadly to the creature before him. Sam did it instead, getting him right between the eyes. The creature howled in pain and Dean stepped back to catch his breath before the Leviathan lunged at him again, pushing him through a door and into what looked like a laundry room. Dean’s head cracked against the window as the Leviathan slammed him up against the wall across from the door and, for a moment, he saw stars. When he opened his eyes again, Sam was pulling the Leviathan off him long enough to spray more of his soapy water in the creature’s face. Dean’s gun had been lost in the struggle and when the creature started to go after his brother again, he threw open the cupboards above the washing machine and began sifting through them for something that could potentially contain Borax. Eventually, he found a carton of bleach. He unscrewed the cap and flung a load onto the Leviathan. The creature rounded on him and tossed the bottle to Sam, who caught it in the midair. While Dean struggled to keep the Leviathan from eating him, Sam threw the stuff onto the creature.

Or at least he tried to.

At the last second before the bleach would’ve hit the Leviathan, the both of them changed positions. Dean, seeing the wall of bleach coming out of the corner of his eye, turned. He saw Sam’s scared expression, he saw the white liquid ready to come down on top of him. He closed his eyes a second too late. And then his retinas were on fire. His grip on the Leviathan slackened as he cried out in pain. He blinked, the world growing fuzzy around the edges, and he gasped as he looked up into Sam’s hazel eyes, full of worry as he began saying, “Dean, oh god, Dean, are you alright? Are you okay?” over and over again.

Dean had opened his mouth to say something, but his throat was on fire as well and that was when he realized he’d swallowed some of the stuff. Sam was already on his cell phone, calling 9-1-1, saying his brother had swallowed bleach by accident and gotten some in his eyes. Dean didn’t hear the person on the other line say they’d be there soon, that everything was going to be alright, but, if he had, he would’ve known that wasn’t true. Everything wasn’t going to be alright. Already his vision was fading and, as much as it hurt him, he kept his eyes wide open, staring into Sam’s. He wanted those hazel eyes to be the last thing he saw.


	3. Two

More than once in his life, Dean had seen the inside of an ambulance, but it wasn’t nearly as often as one might think. Ever since he was six years old, he’d had more than his fair share of near death experiences, which mostly tended to result in his father racing him to the emergency room in the Impala or, if the Impala was out of commission for whatever reason or they were unable to get to it, he would call an ambulance. This had only happened four or five times in Dean’s memory and now, lying on a gurney with Sam at his side, the world a lot dimmer than it would have been normally, he knew this would be his last.

            There was a reason people hid their bleach from their children and not only because if you swallowed some your life was in danger, but also because if you got any in your eyes, it could blind you and, though Dean had swallowed a fair amount and he knew that getting his stomach pumped was something in his immediate future, he had gotten even more in his eyes and he knew he was going to go blind. He clutched his brother’s hand, struggling not to seem like he needed him, needed to see him because soon he wouldn’t be able to, but he kept pulling Sam closer and closer, looking into his eyes, memorizing his face, doing everything in his power to commit to memory what he wouldn’t be given a chance to later.

            Sam had no idea what was going on, to be honest. All he knew was that they’d been fighting  Leviathan, he’d flung some bleach at the creature and, instead of coating the thing he’d aimed for, it’d blanketed his brother, who had swallowed some. Bleach was bad for you when you swallowed the stuff. People had died from swallowing it before. Sam and the rest of the world knew that much and that was the only thing he was panicking about as the ambulance raced in the direction of the hospital and Dean’s vision, once so clear and bright, slowly, slowly began to fade.

-

The minute the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Sam was pushed out of the way as the paramedics rushed his brother into the emergency room and behind a blue paper curtain where they forced a tube down his throat and began to pump his stomach, forcing everything that he’d put into it recently back out. Sam tried to get to the curtain, tried to be there with his brother as they did this and he threw up over and over again into a bucket one of the other nurses was holding, but every time he got close, he was pushed back, told he had to sit in the waiting room until he was told to do otherwise.

Sam didn’t know what they were doing behind that blue curtain, but they eventually wheeled his brother away, unconscious. When Sam tried to get to him again, another doctor held him back, explaining to him as patiently as he could manage that the bleach had thrown of the pH of Dean’s stomach acids and had eaten a hole in the side of his stomach.

“We have to operate quickly if we’re going to save his other internal organs and his life,” the doctor explained. This calmed Sam down considerably and, for the second time in too short a time, he sat down in the waiting room, pressed his palms together and placed his lips against his fingertips, struggling to keep calm while waiting for his brother to come out of surgery.

“How do you think they’re going to fix that, Sammy?” Lucifer asked, sitting down next to him. He placed his forefinger against his chin, taking on a puzzled expression. “How are they going to replace his stomach acids? Is that even possible?”

Sam kept silent. He didn’t want to think about it.

“Dean’s probably going to die,” Lucifer said, sounding genuinely depressed. “And just when you lost Bobby, too? That’s got to hurt.”

“Shut up,” Sam hissed, a little too loudly, since a couple people looked over at him, wondering who on earth he could be talking to. Sam pressed his thumb into the scar on his palm, but, in his current state of panic and anxiety, this didn’t seem to help anything.

“Lots of people have died from ingesting bleach,” the devil informed him. “It happens all the time. It could be worse. At least he’s dying from something normal.” Lucifer chuckled. “Well, _moderately_ normal. You _were_ hunting a Leviathan after all.”

Sam’s hands balled into fists. He didn’t want to hear this.

“I mean, he’s died from other things before. Hellhounds, gunshot wounds, even tacos. Bleach is new, but it’s mundane. _Almost_ normal. You’ve always _wanted_ to be normal, right Sam? Well, now here’s your chance! When people ask you what your brother died of, you won’t have to make anything up! For the most part, anyway.”

Sam opened his mouth to, again, tell Lucifer to shut up, but the devil seemed to have vanished. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to ignore how much his hands were shaking, how tired he was, how Dean could die – this time for good – and how he would be all alone in the world with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The devil was right. He _did_ want to be normal. But like this. Never like this. His last chance at being normal had been Jess, but she’d died seven years ago and, afterwards, his life of normalcy had gone up in flames just as she had.

Three hours passed where he was unable to see Dean. He alternated between pacing around the waiting room with the other families waiting for news of their loved ones and sitting impatiently, hoping that if he stared at the hallway Dean had been wheeled down long enough, he might suddenly appear, happy and healthy, and this all would have just been a bad dream.

            Finally, after Sam had just about given up hope on hearing any news of his brother and was thinking of heading back to the motel for the night, he heard the sound of shoes on linoleum and, along with the rest of the people in the waiting room, lifted his head to see if maybe this time the news was for him. The doctor scanned the waiting room, found Sam sitting in the corner by himself, and walked over to him. Sam immediately stood, managing to somehow look smaller than six feet with the look of fear mixed with hope etched into his features.

            “Hey, doc, how is he?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.

            “He’s dead,” Lucifer singsonged, slinging an arm around his waist, sounding far too merry to be the devil. “He died during surgery. He’s gone. Dead as a doornail. Not coming back. Nothing you can do this time, Sammy.”

            Sam clenched his hand into a fist, digging his nails as deeply into the scar near his thumb as he could, praying this would make the devil disappear at least for now. He heard Lucifer sigh and say, “Fine,” before he flickered out of existence and Sam was able to turn his full attention to the man in front of him and silently pray that what the devil had said was wrong and Dean was just fine. Or at least on his way to _being_ just fine.

            The doctor flipped through the sheets on his clipboard and said, “For the most part, your brother is alright. He’ll recover from the bleach poisoning and should be able to be released from the hospital within the next week. He’ll need at least another couple of days of bedrest after release, but after that he should be fine.” Sam let out a sigh of relief, ready to march through the hospital to his brother and tell him that everything was going to be alright and they’d be back to hunting Dick Roman in now time, but the doctor wasn’t finished and he stopped Sam before he could even move with one word: “However…the bleach did get in his eyes. We got as much out of them as we could, but it wasn’t enough. I’m afraid your brother is now irreversibly blind. He will never be able to see again.”

            Sam froze, tensing up again. Dean? Blind? Those were two words that should never be used in the same sentences unless, the words ‘wouldn’t be able to handle being’ were between them, but that wasn’t what the doctor had said. He’d told him that Dean was irreversibly blind. He’d told him that they’d tried to save his eyes, but hadn’t been able to. He’d told him his brother, who had far too big of a head for his own good, who used his eyes every day, who needed them to do his job, would never be able to see again. Suddenly, Sam was nervous about sitting by his brother’s bedside until he woke up, nervous about having to deal with him realizing he couldn’t see. He didn’t want to be the one to break the news to him.

            Fortunately for him, he wouldn’t be. The doctor wrote down Dean’s room number on a the back of a business card and told Sam that he’d been awake for about thirty minutes and already been talked to about his condition. “We were unable to fully explain it to him, seeing as he told us he didn’t want to hear it and yelled at us when we tried to tell him that this would be important in the future. We warned him we’d have to sedate him and that calmed him down, but I don’t think he was listening when our eye expert tried again to tell him what exactly is going on. I understand he is very upset about his condition, but he needs to know these things for the future, since this is now what his life is.”

            Sam nodded only once in assent before he moved past the doctor and down the hall, thinking, _Not for Dean it isn’t and he knows it._ They’d find a way to cure his blindness. They’d figured it out before, they’d do it again now. They had to. Dean couldn’t hunt without his eyes.

            The room the doctor had written on the business card was at the end of the hall, away from everything else it seemed, just where Dean would like it. He hated hospitals, but when he had to be in one, he preferred the quiet secluded rooms to the loud ones stuck right in the middle of everything.

            “How am I supposed to get better when I have to hear doctors shouting things at each other all fucking day?” he’d said more than once when a request to move rooms had been denied. This tended to get him his way, but there were times when he wasn’t sick enough to have his needs above everyone else’s and he had to suffer through some noise while he recovered, grumbling to Sam the entire time. Sam always smiled and told him he sounded like an old man. Dean would tease back that it was Sam who had made him old.

             There wasn’t much happiness in their lives anymore, so, when the pain wasn’t too much and the despair was minimal, they made their own.

            Before he entered the room, Sam rapped on the door to let Dean know he was there. He opened his mouth to say something, to let him know it was him, when Dean turned towards him and Sam’s words left his mouth.

            Dean had always had beautiful green eyes. They were the first things Sam remembered seeing and he was certain they would also be the last. They lit up when Dean laughed, they dimmed when Dean was sad, they showed every would-be emotion that Dean had, even when he was struggling to keep said emotions hidden from his brother who knew him better than anyone else in the world. If anyone had asked Sam how to read Dean, he would’ve told them to look into his eyes and, if they didn’t get lost, they’d understand his brother immediately.

            But that green was gone now, washed away by the bleach that he, Sam, had thrown at them. It had been replaced by a milky sky blue that covered the iris where the green should have been. At the center, on Dean’s pupils, was a grayish-white, shading his eyes from every sight that the world had to offer forever.

            Normally, Sam would’ve been focusing on the machines his brother was connected to. The heart monitor set up in the corner, the IV pole nearby, the tube of oxygen that was fixed into the wall. But none of that seemed at all important compared with the sight of Dean’s eyes and the fact he would never be able to read any emotion out of them ever again.

            “Heya, Sammy,” Dean said, smiling slightly, turning his head in the general direction of his brother, his eyes staring straight past him. Sam had no idea why he was surprised that, though he hadn’t said a word, Dean knew it was him. “Check it out. I’ve got no eyes anymore. No more hunting for me!”

            He said this cheerfully, like it was a good thing, like he wasn’t bothered at all, but Sam could hear Dean’s bitter undertones and knew his brother was just saying this for his benefit, trying to reassure him that he was fine, just as he had when they were younger and he was bleeding out from whatever what they’d been hunting had done to him.

            “It’s going to be okay, Dean,” Sam said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll find someone who can reverse this. I’ll make it okay.”

            Dean laughed humorlessly and shook his head. Suddenly Sam knew that Dean hadn’t ever been trying to make him feel better. Sam had just been hearing what little optimism there was in his voice because he was hoping that somehow his brother hadn’t already lost all hope, that maybe Dean wouldn’t feel like there was no way this could be changed, that perhaps he would have faith in Sam’s ability to help him. He’d done it every time before, so why didn’t he trust him to pull through now?

            “Because you’ve betrayed him a lot, too, Sammy,” Lucifer said. He was blowing his pinwheel again, leaning against the wall by the window. “Why would he ever trust _you_? Don’t you remember when you released _me_?”

            Again, Sam ignored the devil as Dean said, “The doctors already told me this is irreversible blindness, Sammy. Nothing we can do.”

            “No,” Sam said, firmly. “Nothing, _they_ can do. It’ll be okay. We know about things they don’t, Dean. You and I both know that we can –”

            “Stop, Sam,” Dean said, firmly, turning back to his brother, his eyes fixed on Sam’s, almost as though he weren’t blind at all. “The last faith healer we found had a wife with a reaper on a leash. Remember that? The only other person that might be able to heal me is an angel and the only we know that likes us is dead. There is no way to make this better, Sam.”

            “It’s going to be okay. Please have faith in me, Dean –” Sam tried to begin again, but Dean cut him off.

            “I can’t see you, Sam.” His voice was so soft that Sam wasn’t even really sure he’d head him to begin with. “I can’t see you all grown up. I can’t see the dimples on your face when you smile. Hell, I can’t see if you smile anymore…do you?”

            “Dean –” Sam began yet again, struggling to ignore the way Dean looked at him, with such sadness etched into his features as he spoke those last two words.

            “Sam, I swear to God, if you tell me it’s going to be okay one more time…” he turned away again, shaking his head, his unseeing eyes on the blanket bunched in his lap. “It’s not going to be okay…because it already isn’t…”

            This time when Sam closed his mouth, it was permanently. He didn’t have anything to add, anything else to say. Sam knew it was a blessing and a curse that he had always had so much hope, even when everyone else had none. A part of him thought that maybe he shouldn’t search for a cure for Dean’s eyes. Maybe they should just settle down and forget about this and leave the hunting life for good. But another part, the part full of hope, told him he couldn’t fail Dean like that. He had failed him in too many other ways. And, no matter how this turned out, he had to at least try to find a cure for his eyes. He had to try to find someone who could return his brother’s sight.

            _No,_ a voice in his mind corrected as he made himself comfortable in the chair that was sitting next to Dean’s bed. _You_ have _to find someone who can help Dean. You can’t stop searching until you’ve found someone. You can’t let him down again._

            And Sam knew the voice was right. He _had_ to help Dean. Too many times in his life he’d let him down and the very last possible thing he could do was let him down again.

            _Dean may have lost all hope that his sight will return, that I’ll find someone to help him, but I haven’t and I won’t. He needs me to help him.  And that is exactly what I will do._


	4. Three

The doctors made Dean stay in the hospital for another three days for observation. Unlike any other time when they were hospitalized, Sam didn’t sign Dean out early, but every day when Sam came to visit him, Dean would beg him to do exactly that.

            “It’s not fair, Sam,” he whined when Sam told him ‘no’ yet again. “I can’t sign myself out anymore. Why can’t you just do it? Just this once?”

            “I always sign you out early,” he reminded him. “And what’s so bad about being so well taken care of for a few more days? I thought you’d like staying here. Free food and board.”

            “It’s not really free,” Dean reminded him. “They just think we have insurance.”

            Sam glanced around to make sure no one overheard them. His brother was speaking a little too loud for his liking and the minute they found out their insurance was fake, he’d have no choice, but to book it out of there with Dean thrown over his shoulder. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that might be exactly what Dean was trying to do, so he changed the subject.

            “I’ve been camping out in the impala in a field the last few days, watching the stars at night when I can’t sleep.”

            A look of pain crossed Dean’s features and Sam realized too late he’d said the wrong thing. One of Dean’s favorite things to do was look up at the stars and now, because of Sam, he couldn’t do that anymore. Sam winced and pretended he hadn’t noticed Dean’s expression and amended quickly, “But it’s been overcast almost every night, so I can’t see much.”

            Still the look of pain didn’t go away. The damage had already been done. Sam cursed himself, while Lucifer laughed in the corner. He was currently tearing apart what Sam thought was a napkin. He ignored him. After all, the devil _could_ be doing something a lot worse.

-

During Dean’s hospital stay, Sam had been searching for a place where they could potentially live indefinitely. He didn’t know how long it would take Dean to adjust to his loss of eyesight and he also didn’t know what he would do before or after his brother had done so. He wanted to think that maybe they’d be able to continue their search for Dick Roman – he knew Dean would want to – and eventually avenge Bobby and save the world (again) at the same time, but the more he thought about what had happened to Dean and how it could potentially be irreversible, he wasn’t sure this was something they could do anymore.

            So, when Sam wasn’t with Dean, he was looking at cheap apartments abandoned houses, trying to find them a place to live. Finally, the day of Dean’s discharge from the hospital, he found them a suitable house near the city, but also in the suburbs. It was abandoned, but the people who’d abandoned it, seemed to have left in hurry. Some of the furniture was still there: a couch in the living room, two twin sized beds in one of the bedrooms, a king sized bed in another, a few empty bookshelves, a coffee table, an old television set, and a small oak table with two matching chairs. There were also a few personal belongings that hadn’t made it into the rushed get away the previous owners clearly were in: some boxes full of magazines and books in a closet, a few baby blankets, some breakables placed here and there, a few magnets on the refrigerator.

Sam knew it wasn’t an ideal living space. Not by a long shot, but beds were made, the couch was comfortable enough and all of the appliances that had been left behind worked. He figured it would be a good place for them to stay. At least for a little while. Besides, the Leviathan wouldn’t expect to find them there. No one would, really. This was the most inconspicuous they’d ever been.

When Sam picked up Dean at the hospital only a few hours after discovering the place and took him there, he had to remind himself repeatedly that Dean couldn’t see how spacious the house was and how convenient of a place this would be for them. In fact, the first thing Dean said when Sam led him through the front door was, “Where are we? This doesn’t smell like a dirty motel room.”

“It’s a house,” Sam told him tentatively. “Not very big. Only two stories. But it’s abandoned. It has all of its appliances working, three made beds, and a washer and drier.” Sam glanced towards the broken TV and decided not to mention it. Dean couldn’t watch TV anymore anyway. It would only depress him further to be reminded of this fact. However, he would need to know where everything was so he could, in time, get around the house himself. Taking his brother’s arm, Sam led him through the rooms, showing him where the refrigerator, the couch, the beds, and the bathrooms were. After he’d pointed out the essentials, he let Dean tell him what else he wanted to know the location of before he sat him down on the couch, got him a beer, and sat down beside him.

“So,” Sam said, opening their beer bottles, “what do you think?”

“I can’t see it, Sammy,” Dean reminded him, sounding bitter.

Sam sighed. “I know,” he replied, “but what do you think of staying here for a while, until you…adjust?” He was tentative, still unsure as to what could set Dean off and make him even more upset about his lost eyesight.

Dean was silent for a while after Sam finished speaking. In fact, Sam wasn’t sure he was going to answer him. He wanted desperately to turn on the TV, fill the silence that permeated the air around them with something other than the occasional sips they took from their beer bottles, but he didn’t know if the TV worked – it looked broken – and he didn’t want to upset Dean by doing something he couldn’t participate in.

Finally, after Sam was about to decide he didn’t care and try turning on the TV anyway, Dean said, “Why are we staying here instead of going to look for Dick Roman?”

Sam sighed heavily. “You know why,” he said firmly, not wanting to listen to his brother sulk some more about his blindness. “I just told you why. You have to adjust before we can do anything.” He didn’t mention that Dean wasn’t fit to hunt as it was.

“Why do I have to adjust?” Dean asked, sounding angry now. “Why can’t I just go back out into the fucking field?”

“Do you want to get yourself killed?” Sam burst out, feeling his own temper rising. But the instant he said this, he regretted it. He knew immediately what Dean’s response would be.

“Maybe I do! Why the fuck should I have to live my life like this?! Why are _we_ always the ones that get punished, Sam?! All we do is save the fucking world and all it does is make us miserable! Why should we keep trying to save it?!”

Sam swallowed. He didn’t have a good response to that. Why _should_ they keep saving the world when it never seemed grateful? Why _should_ thy risk their lives and their happiness to keep others safe? It didn’t seem fair. It had never seemed fair. Sam understood Dean’s argument, but still, he said, “Because there are good people in this world, Dean. People that don’t know what’s going on and that’s not their fault. They deserve to be saved.”

“Do they?” Dean half-yelled. “Do people who don’t even acknowledge we’ve saved their sorry asses over and over again really deserve to be saved again?”

“Because they don’t know we’re the ones that saved them, Dean!” Sam shouted emphatically, struggling to get his brother to understand. This wasn’t Dean. The Dean Sam knew would never be saying these things, but his brother was motivated by grief and bitterness and, after all they’d been through, who wouldn’t be? It seemed that Dean losing his eyesight was just the final straw. Now all bets were off and he was finished with the world.

“Why don’t they know?” Dean growled. “Why aren’t we treated like the heroes we fucking are for saving their miserable lives? Why don’t we just go out and say, ‘Hey, we saved the world. _Twice_. You should be bowing at our feet.’”

“You _know_ why we can’t do that,” Sam retorted. “If we told anyone who wasn’t a hunter about what we’ve seen and what we’ve done, we’d be locked in a padded cell for the rest of our lives! The majority of the world doesn’t believe in angels or demons or any of the creatures we’ve dealt with in our lives! Let alone have seen them and had to kill them!” Sam picked at a hole that was steadily growing larger in his current pair of jeans. “It’s not their fault that they don’t know what’s going on.”

“They should know,” Dean hissed. “How could they not? With all the shit that’s happened in the past seven years, how could they not think that wasn’t some sort of apocalyptic crap? There has to be at least one normal person out there that has an inkling of what’s happening around them.”

“One person can’t convince everyone that angels and demons exist, Dean,” Sam reminded him.

“One person convinced almost everyone in Europe that Jewish people weren’t loved by God,” his brother retorted.

“That’s not the same thing and you know it,” Sam said. “Everyone knew that Jewish people existed. Not everyone knows about the existence of angels and demons and Wendigos and vampires. Those only exist in legends to most people. We just happen to be part of a select group of individuals that knows they’re actually real.”

Dean shut his mouth and said nothing else, but Sam knew the argument wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. In fact, he was pretty sure this argument was just getting started.

-

The next few days were spent getting used to their new home. Dean rarely left his room and when he did, he always was pressed up against the wall, his hands held out in front of him as he felt with both his feet and his fingers for what was in front of him. It seemed to work well for the most part. However, more often than not, Sam heard a large object crashing into the walls, followed by a string of curses that got more colorful each time it happened. Sam pretended not to notice, knowing that this was what Dean preferred. The last thing Dean would want was for Sam to acknowledge his weakness, how vulnerable he was and Sam didn’t want to make Dean feel worse than he already did, so he sat on his laptop, researched anything and everything that could heal a person that wasn’t an angel, a faith healer, or some ordinary doctor, and came up with a whole lot of nothing.

            Then, one day, Dean crashed into the wall and Sam didn’t hear any curses. In fact, he heard nothing. For a long time he heard nothing. He listened for the sound of Dean getting up, going about his business, but that sound never came and, immediately, Sam began to panic. What if Dean had run into the wall and hit his head badly? What if the crash hadn’t been a crash at all? What if it was a gunshot and Dean had killed himself?

            This last thought was what had Sam shoving back the chair as he bolted from the table and up the stairs. He expected to find his brother unconscious or worse, but, instead, he found him sitting in front of the wall, his shoulders shaking, his head hung, his hands in his lap, droplets shining the backs of his palms and he immediately knew Dean was crying.

            To be honest, though Dean put up a good front, he cried a lot, though never without good reason and Sam really couldn’t think of a person who deserved a good cry more at the moment than Dean.

            He moved tentatively towards him, trying not to make the floorboards creak, trying not to make it seem like he was there or listening or wanting to help him, but the moment he stepped forwards, Dean’s head jerked towards him and he let out a heavy sigh, saying in a jerky voice, “I know you’re there, Sam. I can hear you.”

            Sam stopped moving. Vaguely he remembered when once upon a time they’d gone to a faith healer in Nebraska because Dean was dying of a heart condition that he’d contracted after being electrocuted when trying to get rid of a rawhead. It had been eight years ago that that happened, but Sam remembered the tent, the smell of wet grass, the chill of the air, and sound of the old upright piano behind him as clear as day. He remembered an old reverent telling his dying brother, “Be careful what you say around a blind man, son, we’ve got real sharp ears.” And now Sam wondered if this wasn’t some sort of retribution. They’d trusted someone to heal Dean, to give him back a life, but they’d taken everything away from this person instead and now, just like that man, Dean was blind.

            Without another word, Sam dropped to his knees beside his brother. He took his damp hand in his own and opened his mouth to say something, but, without a word, Dean slumped against him, knotting his free hand in the fabric of his hoody, as he began to sob into his shoulder with complete utter abandon.

            For a moment, Sam was frozen in shock. Dean never did this. Not when he was brought back from Hell and the memories hurt him, not when he lost Lisa because Sam was soulless and hadn’t been thinking, not even when he told Sam of the night he died in his arms in a ghost town. Never had Dean ever cried like this and yet now he was. Sam tried to come up with an explanation other than the fact that he was blind, but he couldn’t and, for the first time, Sam realized just how badly his brother had been hurt by his loss of sight.

            “It’s your fault, Sam,” Lucifer reminded him. He didn’t have his pinwheel today. He was just crouching down next to them, watching as Sam wrapped his arms around his broken brother, trying to put the pieces back together again as best he could. “If you’d thrown the bleach just a few seconds earlier then Dean wouldn’t be blind right now. He wouldn’t be running into walls. You wouldn’t be living in this dump. And you wouldn’t have let Dean down. Again.”

            Sam ignored the devil as best he could, reminding himself over and over again that he was only a hallucination, no more than a figment of his imagination, but that didn’t change the fact that what he said was one-hundred percent true.

            _It’s your fault, Sam,_ the voice of the devil now whispered inside his head. _It’s your fault and there is nothing you can do to change it._

-

It was almost a month before Dean reverted to his somewhat regular self and, instead of holing up in his room and sulking, he went down the stairs and chose to stay as close to Sam as possible. Of course, Sam didn’t mind. He was certain if their roles were reversed, he would be doing the same thing.

“You find anything?” Dean asked, trying to sound nonchalant as he plopped himself down in the chair beside Sam.

He was colliding with the wall less now. It seemed that ever since the day he’d broken down in Sam’s arms, he’d been trying to do better, but he still cursed every time he did so. However, even this small accomplishment had put him in better spirits and Sam noticed that his brother had brought over a couple of beers for them before he sat down. He smiled, though Dean couldn’t see it and replied, “Not so far. I don’t know if any of these faith healers will work and even if they do I don’t think you want someone to switch places with you again if they have a reaper working for them, so that’s out. The only other option seems to be demon deals and angels and I don’t think we even need to discuss why those aren’t on the table.” He glanced at Dean and swallowed, adding almost tentatively, “There’s witchcraft, but that’s…unreliable, too.”

“How so?” Dean asked popping open his beer bottle and taking a swig that a healthy person wouldn’t have been able to.

Sam sighed. “Do I really have to explain it to you?”

Dean turned in the direction he thought Sam was. He was only a couple inches off, so he didn’t have the effect he wanted to when he replied, “Yes.”

Sam sighed again. “Well, one, it’s dangerous. We could _accidentally_ kill someone if we try and if we hire a witch they could _purposefully_ kill someone without telling us. Not to mention that we don’t even know if it would work because we’re _not_ witches and, since witches use darker magic, they get demons to do their dirty work and even if we managed to find a witch that _wasn’t_ going to kill people to save you, the _last_ thing I want is to have some smartass demon telling me that they won’t heal you because it’s _you_.”

There was a short silence where Dean stared at his beer bottle in what Sam thought was quiet defeat, but then he said, “I guess those are all good reasons, but we could still try it.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Dean Winchester?” Sam responded, sounding angrier than he meant to. He couldn’t believe Dean was actually suggesting they try _witchcraft_ to heal him. It seemed like a bad idea on so many levels.

“Of course it’s a bad idea, Sammy,” Lucifer told him. He was sitting in the chair on Sam’s other side. “The last time you trusted something you hunt, you ended up accidentally opening the Gates of Hell and releasing me.”

The devil laughed.

“Shut up,” Sam said without thinking.

“I didn’t say anything,” Dean said, looking up from his beer bottle again. There was another short silence before his brother caught on. This time it was Dean’s turn to sigh as he asked, “You’re still seeing Lucifer, aren’t you?”

“No,” Sam lied, trying to sound convincing, but he only ended up succeeding in sounding like a three year old who’d just gotten caught stealing cookies.

“Don’t bullshit me, man,” Dean said, sounding far more tired than angry. “I know you’re…trying to take care of me, but I need to know what’s going on with you too.”

“No, you don’t,” Sam said firmly.

“Yeah, I do,” Dean countered.

“No, you don’t,” Sam said again.

“Yeah, I d –” But Sam cut him off.

“No, you don’t because you need to take care of yourself! It may have escaped your notice, but you can’t see, Dean!” Sam was shouting now. “You can’t see and that means that if we go anywhere or do anything, I have to watch out for both of us and you can hear better than me, which means you need to be…listening for both of us! I can’t have you distracted by what’s going on with me, which is why me seeing Lucifer isn’t that big of a deal right now!”

Silence.

Finally, Dean pushed himself up from the table and said, “Sam, if you honestly think I keep forgetting I’m blind when I’m reminded every time I blink, then you’re a lot more dense than I thought.”

He didn’t say anything else, but his words had a double meaning, Sam knew. It was Dean’s way of saying, “Fuck you,” without the expletives. He watched as his brother felt his way back to the stairs and went up them. He listened as his brother shut the door behind him when he got to his room. He expected to hear some sort of outburst. Maybe punching the wall, yelling into a pillow. Something.

But instead there was silence and, for Sam, this was almost worse.

 


	5. Four

Dean didn’t talk to Sam for almost a month after that. Whenever Sam came into a room, he immediately left it. If Sam tried to talk, he pretended he wasn’t listening. If Sam made dinner, Dean made a point of not eating it or eating it later when he was certain Sam was asleep. Sam pretended it didn’t bother him. He continued researching, trying to find a solution to Dean’s loss of sight that wasn’t a witch, a doctor, a faith healer, or anything that might involve human sacrifices, but nothing came up on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any of the other search websites he’d become so accustomed to using. He tried a few other searches, rephrasing his words and using different ones, but, no matter what he did, nothing came up.

            “Just apologize to Dean,”Lucifer said, plopping down next to him when he’d tried searching for help for his brother for the umpteenth time. “You’re not going to find anything that will help him. You might as well, just try to make things up to him.”

            Sam didn’t want to admit defeat so easily, but after searching for a way to help his brother for nearly two months to no avail, he was starting to wonder if he would _ever_ find a way to get his sight back. He ran his fingers through his hair and glanced in the direction his brother had last gone. Most of the time he felt he was alone in this big house. Dean spent most of his time in his room doing who knew what. Sam didn’t dare go upstairs and try to find out. He was certain Dean was on the verge of snapping at him and the last thing he wanted was more conflict between the two of them. That wasn’t really what they needed right now.

            “Maybe he’s concocting a potion to kill himself with,” Lucifer suggested, glancing up at the ceiling. Dean’s room was right above the kitchen.

            “Shut up,” Sam said fiercely and opened his laptop once more. He didn’t need the devil telling him things to heighten his anxiety. A part of him wanted to go upstairs and make sure that was exactly what Dean _wasn’t_ doing, but another part of him, a larger part, didn’t want to indulge in the devil’s tormenting of his mind. As he searched things he’d already run through search websites ten times over, he reasoned that he hadn’t seen Dean bringing anything up to his room so there was no way he could be coming up with any sort of deadly potion to kill himself with. And, besides, why would Dean want to kill himself? He couldn’t see, but Sam was alive and, as vain as it sounded, Sam knew the only times that Dean had wanted to end his own life had been when he wasn’t around.

            Letting out a heavy sigh, Sam followed Lucifer’s gaze to the ceiling and wondered what his brother was doing, thinking, wondered how he was coping with his loss of sight. He could argue that seeing the devil was worse than losing one’s vision, but a part of Sam felt he deserved this. Ever since the night they’d attacked the Leviathan and Dean had become blind, Sam had been forcing down a guilt that this was his fault, that he’d been the one to throw the bleach at his brother and therefore what had happened to him as a result, despite his good intentions, was his fault and that was all there was to it. So far he’d been able to keep a tight lid on those emotions, but now that they weren’t speaking, now that Dean was staying away from him, the emotions were beginning to surface and he was beginning to wonder if Dean had, at last, managed to put two and two together.

-

The bedroom wasn’t that small from what Dean could tell. It had four walls and a door into a bathroom. There was a bed near what he figured was the window. There was a small walk-in closet. And there was a nightstand with a lamp and a book that felt dusty sitting on top of it. The house had been abandoned in a hurry Sam had told him, that was the only reason he’d selected this as their base of choice for the time being. Personally, Dean would’ve preferred a motel room. He was more familiar with their layouts and he would’ve have spent the first couple of weeks in the place bumping into things. It was a lot smaller. There wouldn’t have been as much to bump into.

            Though he had no knowledge of Sam’s thoughts on the floor below, he had, more than once, thought about ending his life, but, in the end, had decided he was being too melodramatic. Sam was searching for a way to return his sight to him and even if he found nothing, why would he kill himself over the loss of his sight, especially after all of the things he’d been through? At first, he’d reasoned that it was because it was just another thing on top of everything else, but decided that was bullshit and figured if Sam could endure while being tormented by hallucinations of Lucifer, why the hell could he not do the same with no vision?

            _Because you rely on your eyes for everything,_ a voice reminded him. _Sam can ignore Lucifer if he chooses, but you can_ never _ignore the fact that you’re blind._

            Dean fisted his fingers in his hair and let out a strangled cry of frustration. He pushed himself to his feet and kicked what he thought was the wall, but ended up being his nightstand. He heard something fall off and crash to the ground and his irritation grew. He slammed his fist into the wall over and over and over again, until he felt his knuckles would break. Then he pulled them away and, letting out a gasp, began kicking the bed until he heard one of the legs splinter.

            It wasn’t fair! Why should he be stuck with blindness when others who’d done things, _terrible_ things, should be left alive and well and happy? He thought of a hunt he’d gone on years ago when Sam was at Stanford. There’d been a little girl who had bruises appear on her without anyone touching her, a family had said, and she was scared of everyone. But in the end, it turned out the family was lying. Her parents were beating her and her father was doing things to her that no father ever should. Just when Dean had figured out what was happening, how to save her, he’d wound up at their house and watched as the little girl was put in a body bag and driven away in an ambulance. He’d been too late to save her. The terrible people she’d been born to had killed her. Why weren’t _they_ the ones being punished?

            _Because you couldn’t save her,_ the horrid voice replied. _You couldn’t do what you were supposed to do. You let her die. You’ve let so many people die. You deserve to be in pain._

            He smashed his fist into the wall again and cried out as he felt the plaster give way beneath his fingers and the bones crack.

The door burst open behind him and he shouted, “Go away! I don’t want to talk to you!” But he didn’t sound like himself. Maybe if he had, Sam would’ve listened to him. Instead, of strong and sure, he sounded broken and doubtful. He sounded like a man ready to give up on everything.

He expected Sam to tell him to calm down, to take deep breaths and try to forget about his pain, but he said nothing and did nothing. And, for a while, that was all Dean thought he would do and he wasn’t sure if he was alright with that or not. Then, he heard padded footsteps and, before he knew it, arms were wrapping around him. He let Sam hug him, comfort him, he let him lead him to the bed and sit him down. He kept his face passive the entire time, refusing to let the tears that threatened in his green eyes-turned-pale-blue to fall.

There was silence in the room for a long time, neither of them wanting to speak first, neither of them wanting to discuss the elephant in the room that was punctuated each time Dean looked up not quite at Sam when he thought about speaking before he decided against it. Both of them had too much to say to the other. Both of them wanted to say it all because now seemed like a good time. And both of them were afraid how the other would react if they spoke.

Finally, after what felt like far too long, Sam said softly, staring at his hands, “I’m sorry.”

Dean looked up, trying to gauge exactly where Sam’s voice was coming from and ending up looking just past him instead as he asked, “What for?”

Sam swallowed. “Everything,” he said, trying to force a smile and then, remembering Dean couldn’t see it, dropping it just as quickly. “For making you blind, for saying those…insensitive things, for…everything.” He wasn’t exactly sure how to elaborate. He felt Dean would know what he was saying, know what he meant. He’d screwed his brother over too many times to count and, knowing him, he’d just continue to do it, no matter how hard he tried not to, no matter how much he told himself he would do better. He was nothing more than a screw up and that was all he’d ever been.

There was another silence during which Dean tried to find the words to say something, anything to comfort his brother, reassure him that this wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t. A part of him _did_ blame Sam for his current condition and, no matter how unfair it was, he couldn’t bring himself to lie to him and tell him that he didn’t. He turned away from Sam and he heard his brother let out a breath of sadness. He’d let him down, confirmed his worst fears. He heard the bed creak, felt Sam start to get up, but he didn’t want him to leave. Not yet. He couldn’t go through another two months not talking to him. As much as he knew it was his fault that’d happened in the first place, it had hurt and he didn’t want it to happen again. The only thing keeping him going at the moment was Sam. He couldn’t lose him, too.

“What do you want me to say, Sammy?” He blurted out before he could think better of it. The tears he’d kept at bay thus far were leaking out of the corners of his sightless eyes now. “You want me to tell you how I miss driving my baby, how I miss seeing your stupid grin when you geek out on me, or we could skip to the part where we talk about how I really never appreciated a sunset when I was too busy ganking every son of a bitch that tried to take a bite out of us.”

It was the second part of statement that caused it, though it took until Dean was finished speaking for Sam to fully register what his brother had said and once he did, he didn’t think, he didn’t respond, he only took Dean’s face in his hands, and pressed their lips together. For a  moment, both of them were tense with shock and surprise, half worried that one of the two of them would pull away and anxiously waiting for them to do so, but when they didn’t, when they realized this was mutual and something they’d both wanted without saying as much for far too long, their eyelids fluttered shut and the kiss deepened.

Dean was sloppy because he couldn’t see.

Sam was sloppy because he was desperate.

Dean’s hands ran up Sam’s back and his fingers curled in the ends of Sam’s hair.

Sam ran his fingers up under Dean’s shirt, feeling his not-quite-as-firm stomach.

Dean pressed his forehead to Sam’s closing his eyes and whispering, “I love you.”

Sam did the same.

There was a moment of silence after that where they both sat there, locked together, playing with the ends of each other’s hair, stroking each other’s faces. They knew what was going to happen next and neither knew why they were delaying it, but they were both pretty sure it had something to do with the fact they were nervous about various things and wondering how much their lives would change if they did this.

Then, all at once, they decided it didn’t matter and they began kissing again just as fiercely as before. The kisses became more desperate. Dean pushed Sam back on the bed, straddling him as his hands moved up under his shirt, splaying across his solid belly. He pushed up his little brother’s shirt and saw his brother the only way he could now: through his fingertips. He pulled his lips away from Sam’s and stared not quite at his torso as he traced the contours of his chest and stomach, trying to memorize every line and crevice through the tips of his fingers, wanting to _know_ his brother in a way he never really could before he’d lost his sight. He moved his hands to his face, tracing his long nose, his thin lips, his soft eyelids. He ran his fingers through his hair, rubbing the strands between his thumb, middle, and forefinger. He slid his hands down his arms, ghosting over his palms and each individual finger, pulling them to his mouth and kissing his knuckles tenderly, carefully, almost as though he were terrified he would break if he weren’t so gentle.

Sam didn’t move a muscle while Dean did this. He stayed as still and as silent as a rock as his brother studied him through touch alone. When Dean’s hands dropped his own and moved back to his face, ghosting over his cheeks, his brother started when he felt the wetness there and, when Sam realized he was crying, he seemed just as surprised as his brother.

“Sammy?” Dean asked, looking in the direction he thought Sam’s face was. “Are you okay? Is-is this okay? If it’s too much, I’ll back off…”

He started to move away, started to get off of Sam, but Sam placed his hands on Dean’s thighs, holding him in place, saying, “No. It’s not that. I promise.”

“Then what is it?” his older brother asked, placing his hands over Sam’s pecs.

Sam swallowed. They’d already had this conversation. But that didn’t change how he felt or that his feelings were justified. He closed his eyes tightly for a brief moment, trying to make his world completely black, trying, for that one moment, to understand how it must be like for Dean always and know that he was the one that had caused it. He took a shuddering breath and said, “This is my fault, Dean…what happened to you…if I’d just waited, just a second or two longer, I could’ve gauged the situation better and you would be alright. You wouldn’t be blind. We wouldn’t be stuck in this house. We’d be out hunting Dick Roman and avenging Bobby and everything would be okay, but I…I fucked up again and now...because of it…you can’t see...and I’ve been –”

He was cut off abruptly by Dean’s lips on his own. His eyelids fluttered shut, not with pain as they had before, but from the ecstasy of the kiss. When he opened them again and Dean opened his, revealing the pale-blue that his brilliantly green eyes had become, his brother said, “I don’t want to hear that anymore. It _wasn’t_ your fault, Sammy. You had no idea I was going to turn at the last second. If you had, you never would’ve thrown the bleach.” He placed his hands on either side of Sam’s face. “This isn’t your fault, Sam. I don’t blame you.” It wasn’t entirely the truth, but it wasn’t exactly a lie either and right now, a half-truth was better than a full one.

Sam knew that was all it was. He knew there was a part of Dean that blamed him. He wasn’t sure how big that part was, but, right now, he didn’t want to dwell on it. He let Dean’s acceptance of his apology and reassurance that he didn’t think what had happened was his fault wash over him completely. He let out a soft sigh as he pressed his lips to Dean’s once more, lying back down on the bed as he did so, wrapping his arms around his brother, reveling in the passion he was being given before deciding they’d waited long enough and it was time to get down to business.

They made short work of their clothes. Sam’s shirt was already almost off and Dean’s fingers were already fumbling with Sam’s belt by the time he registered his brother had discarded it. He interrupted Dean’s unbuckling by shoving off his shirt as well. Dean slipped off Sam’s belt just as he began to undo his. By the time Sam’s pants were down around his ankles, his cock straining against the thin cloth of his boxers, Dean was still half clothed and finished undressing by himself.

“You’re too slow, Sammy,” he teased.

“Fuck you,” Sam retorted.

“I plan to,” Dean grinned, looking almost directly at Sam as he said this.

If he’d had his vision, he would’ve seen his little brother’s cheeks turn a bright pink. In fact, just thinking about it made the smile on face falter, but he forgot about it a moment later when their lips connected once more.

They kissed for a while, knotting their fingers in each other’s hair, running their hands across each other’s chests before finally they strayed below the waist and they clumsily palmed one another, gasping in pleasure as they did so. Dean ground his crotch against Sam’s and Sam moaned into Dean’s shoulder. Dean’s grin returned at the sound his little brother made, the sound _he_ made him make. He knew he was far too proud of himself for this, he knew he should be disgusted by the thought of fucking Sam and making him come, but he wasn’t, hadn’t been for a long time, but they could discuss that later. Right now, he wanted to get down to business.

Pushing off of Sam’s lap, Dean kissed Sam’s lips, his chin, his jaw, and his collarbone. He kissed down his chest to his bellybutton and the waistband of his boxers. He moved his fingers just under the elastic, feeling the coarse hairs that he knew trailed down from Sam’s bellybutton on the tips of his fingers. Then, in one swift movement, he shucked off the last article of clothing separating him from Sam’s cock and released it.

Maybe it was a perverted desire to want to see your brother’s penis, but in that moment, Dean wished more than ever that he had his sight back. A part of him considered that maybe it was due to the fact he no longer _had_ his sight that this was happening, but that didn’t stop the wish from being there. He wanted to see what his brother looked like completely naked. He wanted to stare at him for a long time and not look away now that he no longer had to pretend he was disgusted by seeing his brother without clothes. But his blindness remained and no amount of silent wishing or praying was going to change that just now.

After only a few milliseconds of awkward fumbling, Dean’s fingers again found Sam’s cock. He moved his hand up and down the shaft a few times, listening to Sam moan, imagining him tilting his head back in pleasure, before he wrapped his lips around the head and swirled his tongue over the slit. He could feel Sam shuddering beneath him. He felt his brother’s fingers pull as his short hair. He smiled around Sam’s cock and took more of him into his mouth. He moved his head up and down, fucking him with his mouth, loving the sounds he made as he did so.

“You gonna come for me,” Dean asked at one point, pulling off of Sam’s cock just long enough to ask the question. “You gonna come in my mouth?”

“F-fuck yes,” Sam moaned, struggling to form coherent words around the pleasure he was being given.

Dean managed a grin before he got back to work.

Sam cried out and thrust his hips upward almost choking his brother as he came only a short time later. When Dean had finished swallowing everything Sam shot down his throat, he crawled back up the bed and kissed him. Sam, spent from his orgasm, responded sloppily.

“I thought…you wanted to…fuck me…” he gasped out in between deep breaths.

“I know a thing or two about men fucking,” Dean replied, kissing Sam again. “And we don’t have any kind of lube.”

He didn’t need to say anymore.

“C’mere,” Sam said, still slightly breathless.

“Sam, I just said –”

Sam rolled his eyes and pulled Dean towards him, placing his hand on his crotch, as he said, “I heard you, _but_ you haven’t been taken care of yet.”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” Dean replied as Sam kissed him.

“I know,” Sam said against his lips. “But I want to.”

He moved his hand a bit, feeling his brother’s hard cock still sheathed in his underwear. He could see a wet spot where precome had dampened the cloth. Unlike Dean, he took his brother’s boxers off slowly, easing them down his thighs and calves and over his feet as though he had all the time in the world. Dean was trembling with anticipation and Sam loved it. However, once he’d thrown Dean’s boxers on the pile of the rest of their clothes, littering the floor, he did what Dean hadn’t been able to do and stared at him.

Sam took in the sight of his brother, considered beautiful by every girl, naked before him. He thought about how jealous he was every time Dean went home with one of them or brought them back to the motel. He thought about how much he hated his brother for fucking them. He remembered when he’d realized why that was. But now he had him all to himself and he planned to take full advantage of it.

Unwilling to get Dean off the same way his brother had gotten _him_ off, Sam took Dean’s cock in his hand and began to stroke him. Slowly, at first, feeling every inch of him, his thumb moving around the soft skin of the head, spreading the wetness leaking from the slit around it. He grinned when Dean let out a gasp and a shuddering moan. It let him know whatever he was doing, he was doing it right.

It took Dean a lot longer to come than it had Sam. Maybe it was because Dean had just had a lot more sex in general than Sam had. Or maybe it was because Sam was stroking him and not fucking him with his mouth. Either way, Sam was glad. He got to watch Dean’s pleasured expressions longer.

Once Dean had finished and they’d both cleaned themselves up in the small bathroom down the hall – Sam having to help Dean here and there – they lay down in Dean’s small single bed, wrapping in each other and saying nothing for a long time, but thinking about a lot of things that neither of them had the courage to voice.  Finally, Sam said, his voice soft and tentative, “I need to keep looking for a way to help you.”

He started to get up, ready to head back down to the computer and his fruitless searching, but Dean wrapped his fingers around his upper arm and pulled him back down. It shocked Sam a little that, though Dean had been out of commission for a few months, he still hadn’t lost his strength. He’d never had the muscles Sam had, but he’d always been strong enough for both their job and keeping Sam in check.

Normally, this thought might’ve made Sam smile, but, as it stood, he turned to his brother, looking into his foggy pale blue eyes, though he could not see him, wondering what would keep him from trying to fix what he’d done.

“Just lay with me for a little bit, Sam,” Dean said softly, and this time when he turned to look at his brother, he looked directly at him. Sam could almost pretend Dean wasn’t blind, he was just wearing stupid contacts because he was trying to impress his little brother again in some stupid way that would only make Sam roll his eyes but smile, too.

But that wasn’t what was going on.

Dean was blind and it was Sam’s fault.

“I-I can’t, Dean,” Sam said softly, pain etching itself into his features. “I have to fix this. I’m the one that did this to you and I have to fix it.”

“Didn’t you hear me, when I told you I don’t blame you?” Dean asked, sounding slightly angry and frustrated now. “What happened isn’t your fault. It was an _accident_ , a _stupid_ coincidence and that couldn’t have been avoided.”

“But _I_ still blame myself, Dean,” Sam said firmly before his brother could say anything else. “ _I’m_ the one that threw the bleach and if I’d just waited a few seconds longer, it wouldn’t have gotten in your eyes and you wouldn’t be blind. I’m glad you’ve forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself…not until I fix this.”

This time when Sam pulled away, he didn’t stop him. They were both thinking the same thing: What if he _couldn’t_ fix this? What then? Sam had been able to fix every mistake he’d ever made up to this point, but this one was different. It was something that couldn’t be healed with time, only a medicine that he wasn’t even really sure he could find.


	6. Five

It took Sam another three weeks after his and Dean’s consummation in the bedroom to find what he was looking for: a witch who could heal Dean’s eyes without using any sort of blood sacrifice. He’d given up on trying to find someone who _wasn’t_ a witch shortly after he realized that was the only kind of person that would be able to help them. This witch that he’d found was supposedly very powerful. On her website, there was a quote from a man who said he’d been cured of cancer by her and Sam figured this was the most reliable bit of information they were going to find, but he still spent another week trying to find more information about her before he finally went up to Dean’s bedroom, where his brother still spent most of his time, and said, “I’ve found someone I think can help you.”

            Dean looked up from his place on the bed and, as usual, looked just past Sam as he asked, “Who is it?”

            He took a deep breath before he said, “A witch. From what I can tell she’s really powerful and she’s the real deal. She even had a section for hunters, swearing up and down that she doesn’t use any sort of blood sacrifice in her rituals. It’s all herbal. She says it’s not as powerful as it would be if she _did_ use blood sacrifices, but she’s learned how to make it powerful enough that she can help anyone who needs it.”

            For a moment, there was silence and Sam was half worried that his brother might be angry with him for not finding someone sooner. Then Dean asked, “I thought you weren’t looking into witches, doctors, or faith healers.” His tone was bitter and Sam understood why. The last time they’d discussed this, Dean had told him that maybe those were their only options. It had taken Sam a little over two months to realize that his brother was right.

            Huffing, Sam replied, “Because I couldn’t find anyone else.”

            This time when Dean didn’t reply, Sam knew it was because his brother was gloating, if only silently without an expression on his face.

            “So,” Sam said, ignoring the rotten feeling of being proven wrong in his chest, “I’ve arranged an appointment with her for tomorrow afternoon. I’ve told her you’re blind and that we need that fixed. She said she should be able to fix you.”

            Neither of them said anything. Nothing needed to be said. Within twenty-four hours, Dean would either be cured or he would still be blind. In any event, it was really out of their hands now and in the hands of a woman they didn’t know, which, in Sam’s opinion, was almost worse, especially considering she was a witch.

            “You just said she’s reliable,”Lucifer reminded him, showing himself for the first time in days. “Who were you trying to convince? Dean? Or yourself?”

            Sam didn’t respond. He had a point, but he didn’t want to admit that.

            “Dean’ll hate you if you can’t help him, you know,” Lucifer told him, perching atop the counter once Sam got back to the sparse kitchen. The devil pulled over a chair to rest his feet on. It happened to be the one Sam had been using earlier. He sighed heavily, the acknowledgement he would give to the hallucination and pulled another one around to where his computer was. “I know he said he forgives you, but he’s probably just saying that to make _you_ feel better. He doesn’t like seeing his little brother sad. Even when he is the reason that he’s blind now.”

            “Shut up,” Sam hissed. He plugged a pair of earphones into the computer in front of him and turned on some music. He really doubted he could drown out Lucifer that way if the devil really wanted to bother him, but it was worth a try. And, to his everlasting shock, it _did_ work. Sam focused on surfing the web instead of the possibility that this woman was a fraud Dean was never going to see again.

-

The two spent the majority of the day leading up to the appointment lounging around the house. They weren’t sure how much longer it would _be_ their house. For all they knew, a government official could walk in at any second and arrest them for trespassing. Maybe someone nicer would just come in and tell them they had twenty-four hours to vacate the premises. Sam hoped that if that did happen, it was the latter. He’d been in jail _and_ prison before and neither were fun places to be. He’d had Dean to protect him on both occasions, but with his brother blind, he wasn’t sure how much protecting Dean would be able to do. Best to avoid it altogether.

            _Once he can see again, we’ll leave,_ he promised, sifting through webpages on his computer to kill time, until they had to leave at one-thirty for the woman’s house. _They can’t arrest us after we leave, right?_

            “Whoa, Sam,” Lucifer said, sitting on the table directly behind his computer. “Better calm down your anxiety, there. It’s going to leave you to an early grave.”

            As per usual, Sam ignored him.

            It took longer than it might have normally for Sam and Dean to get ready and out the door. Half because Dean couldn’t see where his shoes were, since he never left the house and he couldn’t remember where he’d put them, and when Sam asked if he could help, he yelled at him to leave him alone. And half because they were both terrified of what they were going to find at the house they were going to. They were both too scared to hope. Hoping had gotten them nowhere in the past. They’d learned to expect the worst always. It was a safer move.

            For the first time in a very long time, Sam drove the impala out of the driveway and in the direction of the house where the woman lived. It was on the other side of town and that was why they’d left thirty minutes early. Sam wasn’t sure what her late policy was and he didn’t want to test it. This could be his only chance to make things right again and there was no way he was going to even think about passing it up.

            He parked on the street as there was no driveway and, despite Dean’s protesting, helped him out of the car and up the walk. Dean stopped grumbling about halfway, but he kept his mouth set in a grim line. Even when Sam knocked on the door and the woman answered.

            “I’m Sam Winchester,” Sam began. “This is my brother, Dean. I emailed you yesterday and you said we could come around this time today.”

            The woman gave them both a confused and wary look and for a moment Sam thought they had the wrong house, despite all of the mystical things hanging from the overhang of the porch and crowded around the rocking chairs and wicker tables placed on it as well. But then her expression turned into one of pleasure and she said, waving past herself towards a living room that was stereotypical of any twentieth century fortune teller, “Ah, yes, the Winchester boys. Come in, come in.”

            Now Sam was wary. The only people that had ever called them the Winchester boys were demons and other such creatures they wanted nothing to do with. Still, giving her the benefit of the doubt, he led Dean inside and towards one of the overstuffed couches near a table in a room covered in scarves. He felt as though he were in a gypsy’s tent rather than an elderly witch’s living room.

            “So you’re the young man that talked to me about fixing your brother’s eyes?” the woman said, coming around and sitting in front of them.

            “Yes,” Sam said, glancing at Dean, who was fiddling with a fraying end of a blanket that was draped over the back of his chair.

            “I can help him,” the woman said, an air of warning in her tone, “but he will not be able to see in the same way he could before. He will have to learn how to use his new sight and that could take a very long time.”

            Sam swallowed. She hadn’t told him this over the email, but he figured that even a sight, such as the one she was suggesting, was better than no sight at all. Still, he hesitated. What would Dean prefer? He glanced at him, just as he was opening his mouth to say maybe he should talk it over with him, when Dean burst out, “Do it.”

            There was a short, stunned silence during which Sam and the woman both turned to look at Dean. Then, they both spoke at once.

            “Dean, are you sure?”

            “Are you sure, young man?”

            Dean responded to both of them with a sarcastic laugh.

            “Of course, I’m sure,” he said finally. “For the past several months, I’ve been living blind. I can’t drive my car, I can’t get around the house without bumping into things, I can’t see my little brother smile…” Dean took a shuddering breath and Sam realized there were tears in his eyes and when he spoke next, his voice broke. “I can’t see the stars.” Then, the emotion was gone as quickly as it’d come. “I want to be able to see again. I want to do things on my own. I don’t want to feel so helpless anymore and even if I have to work at this new sight…it’ll be worth it.”

            The woman nodded. Sam nodded. Everyone agreed.

It had to be done.

-

Because Dean was blind and therefore unable to see what the woman was referring to, Sam was the one that helped her gather the herbs for the ritual she would need to perform to help him. It took them nearly twenty minutes to assemble all the herbs needed, then another ten minutes to put them in the right places, and another five minutes after that to spread the smoke of two different herbs around the room. By the time they were finished and back in their seats, Sam felt as though he were sitting in an opium den in the late 1800s.

            The woman said nothing before she took Dean’s hands, holding them carefully in her own, as she began to chant in Latin. At first, Sam panicked. He associated Latin with exorcisms and those were associated with demons. She’d promised there would be no demons, no sacrifices, during the ritual. But then Sam heard the words she was saying and he relaxed. He’d forgotten that Latin was also the language of Heaven.

            “Come, oh Lord, and cure this righteous man of his affliction. Give him a sight to see the world in your perception. Oh Lord, let him see again. Let him see again.”

            She said this over and over again, her eyes closed, her body swaying slightly in time with her words. Finally, after nearly a half an hour, after the smoke and the smell of it, had become cloying and Sam was wondering if anything was happening. He was just starting to assume that this woman was another phony and he’d brought Dean here for nothing when the woman and Dean started to glow. It wasn’t bright, nothing painful to look at. More like they’d gained the powers of fireflies and they were glowing just as brightly and gently as one of them might.

            Sam watched in awe as their brightness slowly increased. He watched as the light became brighter and brighter. Just before he looked away, the light began to shine from Dean’s eyes in an almost eerie way. The light filled the room, almost as bright as the grace of an angel before it finally vanished just as quickly as it had come.

            Once the light had become dangerously bright, Sam had curled himself up against his seat, shielding his eyes, and once he registered the light was gone, he carefully opened one eye, then the other. The woman was standing erect, her hands no longer holding Dean’s. She was staring at the tarot cards sitting on the wicker table between them. Sam’s gaze moved from her to his brother, who was slumped and unmoving in the chair next to him.

            Instantly, he began to panic. There had been too many times in Sam’s life where he’d seen Dean not moving and it meant that his brother was badly hurt or dying. Vaguely, he remembered that if Dean was hurt or dying there would be a lot of blood, that’s usually what accompanied those sorts of things, but Sam was too worried to listen to logic. He pulled his brother up and shook him.

            “Dean,” he gasped out, pressing his fore- and middle fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was there. It was strong. His brother was alive. His panic calmed, then flared up again as he realized that his brother still wasn’t responding to him.

“Dean!” This time he shook him much more violently and after a brief moment, Dean’s eyes snapped opened and he gasped for air. His eyes were still the foggy blue of blindness, but when he looked at Sam, he didn’t look past him, he looked right at him and after several moments of heavy breathing, though Sam already knew what he was going to tell him, he said the one thing he’d wanted to say for months.

            “I can see you…”

            Sam let out a breath and smiled. Tears filled Dean’s eyes as he said again, embracing Sam, “I can see you.”

            The brothers clutched at each other, gasping and crying. It had been only a few months since Dean was rendered irreversibly blind, told by doctors that he would never see again, told by his brother that this was all his fault, but, for both of them, it felt as though it had been years, decades, eons.

Sam thought back to when this nightmare had begun and he felt as though that had happened in another lifetime and, maybe, in many ways, it had. They were in a new place now. There was no longer darkness. Dean could see again and, to him, that was what mattered.

-

After they’d managed to regain their composure, they thanked the woman for her troubles, paying her handsomely. She tried to refuse the large amount of money Sam shoved at her and it was only when Sam explained that he felt bad paying her any less that she finally took it, smiling at them as she led them to the door. Just as they left, she warned Dean that his sight would fade again and he would have to teach himself to see as clearly as he could now.

            “You can only see this well right now because the spell is still strong,” she told him as they headed down the steps of her porch back towards the impala. “Tomorrow it will be fainter and the day after that it will even fainter. Soon it will seem as though you are sitting in a room lit only by moonlight, but, if you work at seeing, you will be able to see as well as you can now. I promise you that.”

            Dean believed her and called back, “I’ll work on it, lady, don’t worry!” Sam felt he should say something as well, but he wasn’t sure what. The right words weren’t coming to him, so all he did was wave. Later they would, but it would be late at night after he and Dean’d had sex for the first time and were wrapped up in each other and he wouldn’t care as much then. He would vow to go back to the woman and say exactly what he was thinking, but, of course, he never would. They would leave the town and the woman behind and find someplace else where Dean would be able to practice strengthening his sight, until it was as strong as it was the day he regained it.

            For the first time in their lives, something had gone right. There hadn’t even been a catch. And, as they clambered into the impala, heading back to their temporary home, they finally, _finally_ , dared to do what they’d given up doing years ago.

Hope.


	7. Afterward

In time, Dean really did learn to _truly_ see again. Even if it wasn’t in the way that he had been born to see, it was, as he’d said the day he’d gotten his sight back, better than not seeing at all. He learned to sense things better, since that’s what this new sight really was, and stopped running into walls as much. In time, he even learned how to drive his car again, and, as time went on, he could almost sense things as clearly as if he could see them.

            Because he hadn’t been hunting for so long, he had to relearn how to shoot and do much of the things he’d known before he was blinded. Sam was patient, helping his brother to concentrate on seeing the target and the bulls eye he was aiming for just as he had been with him when _he’d_ been the student and his older brother had been the teacher so many years ago. More than once, Dean got frustrated and not just during his practice as he tried to learn something he had been so good at before this stupid mistake.

            “Fuck off, Sam,” he said more than once, sounding more tired than angry. “It doesn’t matter. That old bat lied. I’m never going to get my sight back. Not really. If I was, why is it taking so long?”

            Sam struggled not to be hurt by what his brother said when this happened. He reminded himself that Dean had forgiven him – or, at least, he’d said he did – and now it was time to forgive himself. The only way to do that was to continue helping Dean as best he could and to do that, he had to be patient, he had to take the abuse Dean hurled his way and know he didn’t really mean it. He was only frustrated.

            Each time, Sam sat down next to him, laced their fingers together and said firmly, “You _will_ see clearly again, Dean. The fact that you can see _anything_ now is proof of that. You just have to keep working at it, keep practicing. I believe in you. I know you can do this.”

            These conversations felt forced and out of character for both of them, so they were rare and only when Dean was feeling particularly frustrated, but they helped and, with time, his favorite images were returned to him: the stars, his brother, and the open road. The first took far more effort than the other two. The stars, after all, are not large to the naked eye. But he was able to see them again and, when he and Sam stopped in the middle of nowhere to stare up at them again, he was able to appreciate them as much as he’d been able to before.

            As they lay in bed together at night, no longer denying the feelings they’d kept so cleverly hidden for so long, Sam knew things could only get better from here. Of course, the world still wasn’t saved. They had to stop Dick Roman and they had to do a lot more before their work was done, but they were getting there. Slowly, surely, they were returning to the place of relative comfort they’d had before the Leviathan were released, before Dean was blinded, before so much had happened. For the first time, in a very long time, Sam thought that maybe, just maybe, things were going to turn out alright for them.

Of course, there would be bad days, but there would be plenty of good ones, too, and they both would have to learn, all over again, that the good days were the ones that mattered, they were the ones that had to count. They were much harder to remember and think about when things were rough, but they would have to try anyhow or they’d fall into an endless pit of unhappiness and neither of them really wanted to do that again. They’d both seen enough unhappiness to last a lifetime.

            “It’s like I have powers instead now, Sammy,” Dean jokingly told Sam one day, grinning, running his hands over his brother’s face, tracing the contours of it with the tips of his fingers – this was a habit he’d gotten into shortly after he’d regained his sight. What Sam didn’t know was this helped Dean to see it better. Not that Sam minded, anyway. He like the feel of Dean’s fingertips ghosting over his skin. He liked leaning into his touch, closing his eyes and remembering that everything would be alright because he had his brother with him. It was easier to ignore Lucifer when Dean was there. Dean really did make everything better.

Dean could just barely make his brother out now and, with practice and time, he would be able to see him more and more clearly. Every day it would get better, as long as he worked at it, until, the only indication that Dean was truly blind, would be his foggy blue eyes that no longer looked past Sam when he was talking to him. They would never go away, but both boys were alright with that, though Dean sometimes joked it would ruin his looks.

“How am I supposed to pick up girls now, Sammy?” he would ask one night, looking at himself in the mirror, his face pressed up against the glass, struggling to see himself through the fog in his eyes. “Everyone’s going to think I’m creepy and run away.”

Sam would laugh and respond, “That’s what you have me for.” He’d come up behind him and kiss his temple, wrapping his arms around him from behind, settling his chin on his brother’s shoulder to stare into the mirror with him. “Do you really think you need to impress girls when you have _me_ to go for?”

Smiling, Dean would turn around, take Sam’s face in his hands, and kiss him on the lips, saying, his voice soft and gentle, “What do you think I was really trying to do for all those years? I didn’t make a fool of myself just because I thought those girls would like it. I was only ever trying to impress you.”

Then Sam would smile and they would kiss again and head back towards the bed they shared – though, they still asked for two out of habit – and would collapse into it before they made love, ruining the immaculately straightened sheets and making the maids whisper about all the racket they heard in room 238 the night before.

“There’s something strange about those boys,” Sam heard them say once when they’d been in town longer than a couple of days and he would repeat it to Dean only to laugh because, really, neither of them cared any longer what other people thought of them. They didn’t even care if they knew that their relationship wasn’t one normal brothers had. All that really mattered to them was that the fear and the pain Dean had suffered for the past several months, ever since the accident, had disappeared with the smoke in the room where his blindness had been cured, and, in the end, after all that had happened, that was all that truly mattered to both of them.


End file.
